The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  DAVID IRELAND was born in 1927 on a kitchen table in Lakemba in south-western Sydney. He lived in many places and worked at many jobs, including greenskeeper, factory hand, and for an extended period in an oil refinery, before he became a full-time writer.

  Ireland started out writing poetry and drama but then turned to fiction. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future.

  David Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel Archimedes and the Seagle. He lives in New South Wales.

  PETER PIERCE is adjunct professor in the School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He edited The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia and The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, and is the author of Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally’s Fiction and The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. His reviews appear regularly in Australian newspapers.

  ALSO BY DAVID IRELAND

  The Chantic Bird

  The Glass Canoe

  A Woman of the Future

  The Flesheaters

  Burn

  City of Women

  Archimedes and the Seagle

  Bloodfather

  The Chosen

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  Copyright © David Ireland 1971

  Introduction copyright © Peter Pierce 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Angus & Robertson 1971

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147066

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148148

  Author: Ireland, David, 1927–

  Title: The unknown industrial prisoner / by David Ireland; introduced by Peter Pierce.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Unrefined

  by Peter Pierce

  The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

  IN 1928, the year after David Ireland was born, George Mackaness edited the anthology Australian Short Stories. The selections were drawn, he cheerily declared, from ‘the cream of thousands of Australian stories typical of Australia and her “makers”’. Many of their titles focused on supposed distinctive national types. Here were ‘The Half-Caste’, ‘The Drover’s Wife’, ‘The Parson’s Black Boy’, ‘The Emancipist’, ‘The Tramp’.

  The title of Ireland’s second novel, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971), announced the discovery of another national type, hitherto unrecognised or without acclaim: the prisoner bound to have his individual identity suppressed by gaolers, in this case the managers of the oil refinery on the shores of Botany Bay owned by the giant British-European Puroil Company.

  Each element of Ireland’s title resonates. The workers are unknown, except to one another, and then they are known through a screen of nicknames, affectionate and abusive. They are deemed dispensable and unimportant, treated as though they are ‘Men Without Qualities’ (the title of the novel’s seventh chapter). The cruel and newest manager, referred to as the Wandering Jew, muses: ‘now individual man is detached from the earth, from others, even from basic life itself.’ Worse, the men acquiesce in their own abjectness: ‘the Sumpsucker knew that though they were tall, bronzed, rugged Australian individualists, more or less, they would end up doing exactly as they were told.’

  They are workers in an urban, industrial setting, not a rural, agricultural one. Thus their labour is of a kind that had seldom been depicted, let alone anatomised, in Australian literature.

  Finally, they are prisoners. Notionally free to come or go, or not to work, they are self-imprisoned, whether by domestic demands, by habit or by fear of freedom. Figuratively, most of them bear ‘the inch-wide residual scar of chains passed on from father to son, from ankle to ankle for half a dozen generations’. Their many small acts of rebellion neither reform nor overthrow the system in which they toil.

  The cover of a previous edition of the novel showed a detail from a Geoffrey Smart painting, Factory Staff, Erehwyna, in which workers huddle at the base of the towering fence of iron that encloses them. The Unknown Industrial Prisoner is, among much else, Ireland’s brilliant and eccentric intervention in the long history of Australian convict literature. He has diagnosed the pervasiveness of a prisoner’s habit of mind and a new kind of imprisonment for the modern era. The novel’s first chapter, ‘One Day in a Penal Colony’, makes a blunt announcement and analogy.

  If each of the workers at Puroil—whether trade or clerical, blue collar or white—is an unknown industrial prisoner (despite glimpses of the lives outside that some of them lead), this is paradoxically reinforced by their bestowing of nicknames on each other, welcomed or not, that submerge their previous identities. These nicknames are metaphorical and particular, rather than literal and generic.

  They can be endearing. The Good Shepherd is a kind and considerate boss, albeit hampered by his position. By contrast, and as their epithets uncompromisingly denote, the Python, Captain Bligh, the Black Snake and the Whispering Baritone are bosses of an altogether different stamp. Some nicknames, such as that of the would-be foreman the Sumpsucker, are plainly disparaging. Others are nostalgic and winsome. One of the prostitutes who works at the Home Beautiful, the refuge in the mangroves created for the prisoners by one of their own, the Great White Father, is known as the Old Lamplighter.

  The rich mingle of other nicknames evokes worlds elsewhere: Glorious Devon, Two-Pot Screamer, Oliver Twist, Bomber Command, the Volga Boatman (who ferries beer and bodies to the Home Beautiful), Blue Hills, Far Away Places, the Wild Bull of the Pampas, Gunga Din. They refer to past times and other lands, speak at least of unrepressed memory and reverie within the fences of the Puroil refinery.

  Nicknames are closely related to stereotypes: they may be hidden behind, lived up to and embraced, or allowed to diminish those to whom they have been fitted. The two main dissident characters in the novel do not object to the names that they go by within the confines of the refinery. The Great White Father actively resists the ethos of the company. The Samurai, whose name connotes his solitariness and power, does so philosophically.

  They join a small band of literary troublemakers from this period that includes the titular anti-hero of Peter Mathers’ novel Trap (1966) and Monk O’Neill in Jack Hibberd’s monodrama A Stretch of the Imagination (1972). The Great White Father is reconciled to the prisoners’ condition: ‘we’re no one, just whites marooned in the East by history.’ Born, he believes, ‘from a dream of strong drink and several campfires’, the Great White Father knows that he is ‘no frustrated missionary like the Samurai. He was teaching these poor wretches, trained to captivity, to make life bearable.’ The Samurai takes a more
pessimistic view: ‘the place was full of personnel…and short on men.’

  Soon there will be fewer of either at Puroil. The refinery is in ‘a transition stage’ towards automation. Men are still needed during the change, which is bungled because of rundown inventory and demarcation disputes. Ireland, who worked in an oil refinery, observantly and no doubt disobediently, writes in acrid detail of backyard improvisations and the consequences when calamitous months-long shut-downs inevitably occur.

  String holding the governors, solenoid trips wired up, blocks of wood holding in key compressors by blocking mechanical trips, drop-shut gas valves jammed open with bits of wire, buckets and tins placed under oil drops on plants operating at high temperatures, contract labour brought in to do quick and slapdash maintenance jobs on equipment they’d never seen before just to keep the labour establishment figures down to the maximum prescribed from elsewhere. Cutting costs.

  He spares no one. If management bears the heaviest indictment—‘just as silica-alumina was the catalyst in the company’s industrial production process, so hate was the catalyst in the company’s industrial relations process’—the unions are not excused. ‘They’d never been to the plant to look at it. They lived off prisoners’ wages just as industry did. Their organisation was the same pyramidal hierarchy as Puroil.’

  Although it takes place in a disturbed and angry present of fruitless industrial anarchy and petty bureaucratic tyranny, Ireland’s novel brims with historical references and resonances. The refinery is located on ‘the spot where Cook first stepped ashore, two hundred years before’. That is, the east coast of the country was ‘discovered’ in 1770, at the site where the Caltex refinery at Kurnell (the basis for the novel’s Puroil plant) would be established. Within two decades of Cook’s visit the penal colony of Sydney would be proclaimed. Not far away ‘the first Australian factory, at Parramatta, was a place of correction’. The habits of servility, revenge and resentment abide into the modern era at Puroil.

  The novel is also instinct with more recent history. Several characters are veterans of war who have exchanged one strict, if more dangerous, disciplinary regimen for another. The connection is explicitly made in the title of the thirteenth chapter, ‘Tomb of the Unknown Industrial Prisoner’. Others are refugees and migrants from post-war Europe: the Kraut; Herman the German; the Pole called the Plover-Lover; the Italian man (as yet without a nickname) who implores the Glass Canoe (‘a large and formidable man with a history of mental illness’), ‘Break the arm. I go hospital, get compensation. No work for six week, my wife sick, I look after. Please. Not be frightened.’ In a novel replete with them, this is one of the bleakest scenes.

  Ireland’s prose register is formidably capacious, his handling of it adroit. His ease with demotic speech has rarely been matched in Australian fiction, but this is also a novel full of literary and biblical allusions. He ventures arresting images: ‘because of the magnification of their size and speech on the walls the shadows seemed to possess more life and vigour than the men who made them.’ The natural world around appears despoiled by Puroil: ‘the sunset was magnificent, but it was butchered by a few malicious minutes, and fell in ruins to discoloured cloud.’

  Such eloquence prompted a reviewer in the London Times to praise the novel’s ‘ferocious satire’. Yet Ireland is no dour and programmatic social-realist decrier of industrial capitalism in a tradition that includes Judah Waten and Alan Marshall. As the Great White Father remarks, ‘the whole world is Puroil Refinery, Termitary [the offices] and Grinding Works.’ Ireland is indicting institutional and personal cruelties, exposing the decay of the will to resist them, but the nature of dissent in his book is more quietist than revolutionary, a counsel of resignation if not of despair.

  The Unknown Industrial Prisoner is imbued with an exultant pessimism. There had been nothing like it in Australian literature before, and the only thing like it since was Ireland’s second great proletarian fiction, set in a pub in western Sydney: another microcosm of, or satirical counterpoint to, the world outside. This was The Glass Canoe (1976), and it too won the Miles Franklin Award.

  1

  ONE DAY IN A PENAL COLONY

  LOWER DEPTHS It was the same every morning. At ten to six reveille sounded. Mostly a broom handle was applied to the green dented side of a locker, one of sixty to hold the clothes of the men of the four shifts. This time someone with a sense of humour had taken a length of two-inch plastic hose and used three or four lockers as a gong, producing a deafening, heart-stopping crash. This was a bad thing to do; it split the hose used to get hot water from the taps over the handbasin into the mop bucket. Finances didn’t run to another tap or to the employment of cleaners. The echoes died quickly into the concrete.

  ‘Spread out!’ roared the Glass Canoe. His voice was throaty and rich and greedy as if his words were cream. He’d taken his wake-up pill. ‘Stand aside or lose a limb!’ He was always nasty when it wasn’t his turn to go down on night shift. His face smiled when he bashed the lockers with the hose, but that smile was for the Glass Canoe, not the other prisoners. He advanced into the narrow floor space between the rows of lockers with mop and bucket of hot water. Red-eyed, faces puffed and pouchy, hampered and confused by early morning horns, the sleepers were up, desperately scrambling to get hundreds of pieces of scrap rag—their beds—up off the concrete and back into the rag carton before the Glass Canoe could spill hot water on them with the legitimate excuse that the cleaning roster had to start on time. He was a large and formidable man with a history of mental illness; his head full of ambitions, his pocket full of pills, his mouth full of other men’s words. He had no trouble getting past Doctor Death when he came up for his medical. Doctor Death, who would pronounce a prisoner fit for work if he could stand unaided, breathe and had a detectable pulse, was a paid company man in the best understood sense of the word: he knew what his modest two hundred dollars a month was worth and gave service to that amount, making three short visits a week. Six hours. Put out your tongue. Drop your tweeds. Cough. He wasn’t paid to look for nervous disabilities, just cripples and dead men.

  This was shift 2 at the cracking plant. Friday morning, the last of seven consecutive horror shift mornings. Pay day. The normal visible life at the Administration end of the refinery would proceed for the rest of the day and close down at four. Three other shifts would keep the revenue-producing end going—the refinery itself, whose columns rose spirelike into the distance—and shift 2 would come back at seven Monday morning for another seven days. In this place no day started. Nothing ended or began, things just went anonymously on. Morning was a start for some, an end for others.

  They were more than half asleep still; only the fear whipped up by the Glass Canoe’s savage voice got them moving quickly. And the heart-thumping shock of his way of waking them. They were demoralized, cold and cramped and stupid and something less than men. This was due to night shift work; no reflection is intended on the economic circumstances they had been allowed by the wise and benevolent workings of an almost planned economy to attain. Strong young men who’d never been tired in their lives were stopped cold by night work.

  Night shift was sleeplessness, it was an upside down stomach, bowel movements back to front. It was waking up in sunlight at home after two hours sleep to the sound of motor mowers, children, pneumatic drills, door to door salesmen. It was trying to sleep through summer days drenched in sweat, eyeballs grating in sandy sockets, and waking not knowing what day it was. Or where you were, or who you were. And it stretched before them for the rest of their working lives.

  Dust and silverfish dropped from overalls and hair and boots back into the rags from which they came. Look back at the title of this chapter, it has saved me an explanation.

  Most stooped unthinkingly to scratch the inch-wide residual scar of chains passed down from father to son, from ankle to ankle for half a dozen generations, their legacy from the bloody and accursed empire which, to the amusement of its old enemies and
its powerful pretended friends, had since died a painful, lingering death. Though you would not know this if you examined the laws of the colony: all were promulgated in the name of the sovereign of another country.

  Somewhere beyond the refinery’s dome of dust and gas the sun shone splendidly golden.

  GENERAL COMPULSION Dutch Treat eyed the glare of day with annoyance and prepared to put his earphones away and pack up his crystal set. Daylight was no time to be contacting God. Night, when stars shone and the impediment of light was removed, was the right time. God dwelt in impenetrable darkness and could only be contacted by radio.

  Blue Hills, who usually had a better hideaway up on the structures, pulled the beanie from his head, the woollen cap decorated with concentric circles of red and white. His only contact with the society about him was that he was a one-time verbal supporter of a metropolitan football side and grew orchids in his spare time. A shiftworker now, there was a time when he wasn’t; he could still remember going to see the football every week; the yell of the crowd, beer-flushed faces, men selling doubles, ferocious women barrackers, the sly pee into empty cans. It was a long time ago. He had been in for eleven years.

  He had fifteen years to go to retire at sixty. It was a long time. A lot of orchids opening and falling and one year less of life for each few years on shift.

  The country towns had nothing to offer, no new cities were being developed or dams built in the country’s dead centre; prisoners were allowed to drift jobless to the few large coastal cities from all over Australia as soon as they left school, to choose their place of detention. Since wherever they looked the land was owned by someone else, the only place they were not trespassers was on the roads and there were laws about loitering and vagrancy. You had to keep moving and you had to have money or else. There was an alternative. Without alternatives there can be no democracy. There was an infinite freedom of choice: they could starve sitting, standing, asleep or awake; they could starve on a meat or vegetarian diet. Any way they liked as long as they didn’t bother anyone. Unemployment payments weren’t meant to be lived on. They weren’t compelled by others to apply to any one place of labour, but they understood that once accepted for detention their boss or commandant had power over them just as great and far more immediate than the government of the country. To all intents their employer was more powerful, for he was the main point of contact between government and prisoner: he deducted the government’s tax. Apart from this he prescribed how and when men should come and go, how they dressed, when they ate, the movements of their arms and legs, the words they spoke. There were accepted facial expressions, compulsory signs of loyalty, accepted opinions, desirable morals, compulsory attendance on pain of loss of food money, and the rule, made by employers, that the prisoners must not refuse to work no matter how unfairly they considered they were treated. This had once been relaxed and the right to strike obtained, but this right was being eroded away and soon would be no right at all. Employers simply applied to a Court and a strike ban was written in to prisoners’ Awards: no one consulted the prisoners. The days of five hundred lashes were gone but in their place were strike penalties of five hundred dollars a day. The word Democracy had been heard for centuries on political platforms but was nowhere to be seen in the daily earning lives of citizens. They knuckled under or they got out. As for having a say in the running of the enterprise that repaid their support by rigidly controlling them…